The company also announced general availability for Windows Azure HDInsight.

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Microsoft made two database-related product announcements on Tuesday. First, it said that SQL Server 2014, its relational database, has been released to manufacturing, with the official public release scheduled for April 1. The 2014 version supports OLTP for the first time and promises "up to 30-times performance gains." It also features AlwaysOn technology which makes it easy to fail over to Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud computing service in a disaster recovery situation.

Second, the company announced that Windows Azure HDInsight, its Hadoop-based big data cloud solution, is now generally available. It's based on Hadoop 2.2 and supports YARN and Stinger.